The inventive concepts disclosed herein are generally directed to systems and methods for providing users with situational awareness information, and more particularly, but not by way of limitation, to systems and methods of providing users with situational awareness information by displaying visual indicators in the field of view of users.
Soldiers, warfighters, rescue personnel, or other users in military, paramilitary, and civilian operations are called upon to execute a wide variety of military, rescue, disaster recovery, or reconnaissance missions in dangerous and rapidly changing conditions. For example, dangerous missions that place personnel in harm's way may include engaging hostile forces in the field (e.g., in urban, naval, or natural environments), search and rescue missions or operations, surveillance or reconnaissance missions, disaster recovery operations, relief and humanitarian aid operations, terrorist attack recovery operations, and fugitive tracking and capture operations. Providing superior situational awareness and information to personnel such as soldiers, warfighters, or rescuers is important for protecting personnel from dangers and for establishing a tactical advantage that can greatly increase the probability of survival of personnel and successful execution of missions or operations.
Typically, personnel deployed in the field gain some information through visual observation, which may be augmented with various devices such as night vision systems, optical magnification systems, portable sensors such as infrared cameras, GPS receivers, video cameras, synthetic vision systems, or navigation systems. Further, personnel may be in radio or other communication with a control center, satellite, or other ways and may receive additional information, commands, or other support in the field. However, the amount of equipment that can be carried by a user results in current systems having size, power, resolution, number of sensors, range, and other similar limitations. Further, existing personnel-carried systems relying on local sensor data are limited to a single point of view or vantage point, and generally have no access to sensors gathering data from other vantage points, and are limited to the amount of data stored locally on the system, which locally-stored data is often not current.
For example, because enemy forces commonly utilize communication equipment ranging from consumer cell phones to sophisticated military radio transceivers, the ability to visually survey an environment to identify, locate and characterize RF sources can be beneficial in a variety of applications. Visually mapping the RF sources in an environment might reveal the presence and location of enemy forces that would otherwise remain concealed and potentially lethal. Visually providing spatial awareness of the location of nearby RF sources is described in U.S. Pat. No. 8,681,218, the entirety of which is hereby incorporated herein by reference. Further, visually mapping RF sources may reveal a location of a black box, rescue beacon, cell phones, or other RF sources which may aid personnel during search and rescue operations.
As communications technology advances, personnel in the field have potential access to practically unlimited information, including information specific to the user's surroundings and situation and data captured by local and/or remote or off-site sensors. In some instances, while each individual user may be physically unable to carry certain sensors or equipment, users may nevertheless have access to data captured by sensors carried by other users or platforms.
One unexpected downside of the vast amount of data available to personnel deployed in the field is the increased cognitive workload and the time and effort expended by personnel to access, view, process, and understand relevant information in the context of the rapidly changing surroundings and highly-fluid and dangerous situations.
Accordingly, a situational awareness system and method for increasing the situational awareness of personnel by presenting contextually-relevant information in an intuitive and easy-to-understand manner would be advantageous.